If You Plug Twitter Into a Digital Avatar, Can You Live Forever?

In the British TV series Black Mirror, a woman replaces her dead husband with a digital simulation based on his Twitter feed. First, he’s just a bot in a chatroom. But then she builds a walking, talking automaton. Image: Channel 4

In one episode of Black Mirror — the British television series that explores the near future of technology with an edginess reminiscent of The Twilight Zone — a woman’s husband dies, and she replaces him with a robot.

This walking automaton looks like him and talks like him, and it even acts like him, after plugging into his Twitter account and analyzing every tweet he ever sent.

Yes, that’s a far cry from reality, but it’s not as far as you might think. With an online service called Lifenaut, an operation called the Terasem Movement Foundation offers a means of digitally cloning yourself through a series of personality tests and data from your social media profiles. The idea is to create an online version of you that can live forever, a digital avatar that even future generations can talk to and interact with. Eventually, Terasem wants to transform these avatars into walking, talking robots — just like on Black Mirror. And today, it provides a more primitive version, for free.

‘We thought making a single website for people to upload their data would be the best way to democratize it. We wanted to build something that was as accessible to as many people as possible.’

— Bruce Duncan

It’s a rather creepy proposition — especially when you see the digital avatars in action. But the Foundation, created by Sirius Satellite Radio co-founder Martine Rothblatt, takes its mission very seriously, and they aren’t the only ones exploring this unsettlingly lofty goal — not by a long shot.

The tech world is always looking for ways to lengthen lives. Just this month, Google unveiled a company, dubbed Callico, that seeks to cheat death. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has long sponsored anti-aging research though his Ellison Medical Foundation. And PayPal co-founder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel has thrown money towards Aubrey de Grey and his longevity studies.

Terasem is just taking this idea to a different extreme, hoping not merely to lengthen lives but to permanently preserve consciousness. It’s an extension of what Microsoft researcher Gorden Bell is doing with his LifeBits project, where he creates a digital record of everything he does.

First, you upload your photo to Lifenaut, and it uses this image to create an animated avatar — complete with blinking eyes and moving lips. Then you teach the service about yourself, answering a long list of questions and taking a few personality tests. And, yes, you connect the service with your Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts, creating a time capsule of your social media data that the Foundation hopes will further mold the personality of your avatar.

The project is still in the early stages. The avatars are rather clunky –not to mention creepy — and Terasem is a long way from creating true online personalities. It doesn’t actually make use of the Twitter and Facebook data, which just sits on the foundation’s servers for now. But, according to Foundation managing director Bruce Duncan, this is very much a play for the future. The hope is that people will upload their information now, so it will be waiting when the technology catches up.

“We thought making a single website for people to upload their data would be the best way to democratize it,” he says. “We wanted to build something that was as accessible to as many people as possible.”

The big question is whether people really have any interest in digitally preserving themselves. But Duncan says they do. “Some people think about the legacy of leaving a really rich source of information about themselves,” he says. “Others say it’s part of their personal development.” He even floats the idea of talking to your past self. As, say, a 35-year-old, you could converse with the 25-year-old you.

That’s not possible today. The avatars say inexplicable things — “I like to play the fiddle all day long,” my digital self recently told me — and they’re often unable to accurately answer the most basic of personal questions. “We’re more of a research project than a service,” says Duncan, promising that the social media data will eventually play a role in shaping these online personalities. Duncan offers up the possibility that the technology may someday be open source, letting volunteers improve the algorithms that power the avatars.

You can see, and interact, with my avatar below:

But Dale Carrico, a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley, is skeptical. To say the least. He says that the folks at Terasem and other “transhumanists” — those who believe the human body can be radically enhanced or even transcended entirely through technology — are pursing pipe dreams. He doesn’t even give them create for trying. “The trying is evidence only of the depth of their misunderstanding, not of their worthy diligence,” he says. Simply put, an avatar isn’t a person — in any meaningful sense.

‘They are selling their ‘movement’ and their belief to scientifically illiterate, credulous people — many of them especially vulnerable to such a scam because they are personally afraid of dying’

— Dale Carrico

He believes that even though Terasem isn’t charging money for Lifenaut, they’re causing harm to those whose use the service. “They are selling their ‘movement’ and their belief to scientifically illiterate, credulous people — many of them especially vulnerable to such a scam because they are personally afraid of dying,” he says.

People are very much afraid of dying, but that’s also why organizations like Terasem — and companies like Google and people like Larry Ellison — will always look for new ways of extending lives. And it only stands to reason that, one day, we’ll make some progress.

Until we do, a thing like Lifenaut can be fun to tinker with. It may even spark your imagination. But don’t expect much more. “I think that avatars as a digital preservation interface are interesting but also can be pretty creepy and I’m not sure if people would be accepting of them,” says Mark Krynsky, a digital preservation expert.

If you really want a way to extend human lifespans, perhaps you should heed the words of futurist Paul Graham-Raven. “It turns out that technologies which extend, augment or otherwise improve human life are already here!” he wrote in New Scientist ARC. “You may have heard of some of them: clean water; urban sanitation; smokeless cooking facilities; free access to healthcare; a guaranteed minimum income; a good, free education.”